Monday, December 24, 2012

By Maysaloon

"When Seumus Milne writes article after article
lamenting the lack of 'dialogue' between the parties in Syria, he perpetuates a
myth that the Assad regime, along with its Russian and Iranian backers, has been
advocating a negotiated settlement all along. The truth could not be further
from the reality, and there is a real danger that the story of the Syrian
revolution is being re-spun into some nefarious Western plot to eliminate the
'last bastion of Arabism' as one anti-imperialist commentator described
it......

Syrians should rightly be concerned with the extremist elements within the ranks
of the rebels, but they do not need Milne to tell them that, and they certainly
don't need his instructions on the best way to remove the regime that has killed
tens of thousands of Syrians since last March. They should, also, be very
concerned with lawlessness and sectarianism, but unlike Milne they have
recognised that a state which mobilises its resources for mass murder and terror
over a population is far more disturbing and serious than the crimes of extreme
elements who are, after all, criminals anyway. Therefore, Milne has no right to
claim some kind of moral parity between 'two sides', and he certainly has no
right to paint the opponents of Assad, in all their colours and shapes, with the
same brush as al Qaeda. For Iraq and Afghanistan he has always been alert enough
to recognise the divide and rule tactics of an oppressor, or to know where one
must lay the blame when extremism results in atrocities and instability. No such
critical thinking appears to have been applied in Syria. In fact it does not
seem to have occurred to Milne and other Western anti-imperialist writers that
Assad, as an oppressor, is in the same boat as the imperialism they claim to
oppose."